A New Approach – To Finally End an Old Farm Bill Problem

By Seton Motley, on March 28th, 2015

The Farm Bill is a bane of we Conservatives’ existence – and Reality-based policymaking. It is a relic of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR)’s horrendously failed New Deal – a top-down, central-planning nightmare mess.

And over the last eighty-plus years, FDR’s heinous domestic policy has gone global. A worldwide farm market has arisen. We no longer just grow for ourselves. We sell all over – and they sell to us.

Round and round we go. Myriad nations outdo our government interference in the marketplace – so we outdo theirs. Lather, rinse, repeat. So what we now have is a global lattice-work panoply of tariffs and subsidies. A thicket that grows ever thicker – as each next government tries to outdo the last.

Rep. Ted Yoho, R-Fla., reintroduced a bill Friday that encourages the (Barack Obama) administration to target foreign sugar subsidies. Under the “Zero-for-Zero” plan, U.S. sugar policy would also be rolled back in exchange for the elimination of foreign programs, which Yoho says are distorting world prices and inhibiting a free market.

Congressman Yoho is, of course, absolutely correct. We’ve been “distorting world prices and inhibiting a free market” for decades – and on oh-so-much-more than merely sugar.

Here’s hoping the Administration makes this move – and on oh-so-much-more than merely sugar.

It’s way past time we end this fossilized facet of FDR’s New Deal. Both here – and abroad.